Scaling Documentation Processes in the Life Sciences Industry

Teilen auf

Meeting the growth challenge

Since 1996, when HORIBA Medical joined the HORIBA Group, the company’s sales have more than tripled. Due to the rapid growth, the documentation team faced an explosion of new work and expectations. With only seven writers dedicated to supporting more than 13,500 documents in fifteen languages, the company’s growth presented a significant scaling challenge.

Selecting technology for managing structured content

With a vision defined, the team realized they needed a system and process to manage the thousands of topics that would be going through different versions in the source language, as well as delivered in 15 languages. Without a system that could track the relationship of all the topics and graphics to final deliverables, the move to structured content would quickly become unmanageable. Key to the team’s vision was to have a system that could provide a common repository for shared content, ensure a lifecycle on the content, manage key metadata and provide for a strong translation and review process. In the very controlled regulatory environment of the medical business, oversight and audit tracking are critical to the process.

After surveying a number of systems in the market, the team selected SDL Knowledge Center for its strong structured content management capabilities and out of the box support for DITA.

“We found that SDL with SDL Knowledge Center’s baseline and release management capabilities coupled with the system’s outstanding handling of multilingual assets provided the foundation for us to reach our ROI. The system was architected to handle high volumes of content in multiple languages and in parallel releases, which was precisely our business challenge.”